Monday, July 22, 2013

The past few weeks have
been exceptionally tumultuous for reproductive rights advocates around the
country as many state governments have hurried to finish their legislative
sessions. While some states have struggled
merely to pass budgets, others have called for extended
special legislative sessions solely for the purpose of passing
controversial laws that severely impede a woman’s right to seek safe and legal
abortion care. Texas House Bill 2 was passed by the state legislature on July
12, 2013, despite an almost 11-hour
filibuster by Rep. Wendy Davis and massive public backlash. The Texas bill
is only one of several significant laws that have been enacted in the 11th
hour of states’ legislative sessions over past month. In particular, four
states – Texas,Ohio,North
Carolina,andWisconsin
– have all spent the last few weeks pushing through restrictive laws that
hinder the ability of women in those states to access to abortions.

Similar to the
gestational-age bans on abortion services, these new attacks on abortion
clinics requiring new and unnecessary services, certifications, permits, zoning
permission, and other regulations have a significant effect on the ability of
women to seek the medical care they require.

Women have the right to
decide when – and if – to have children, including the right to terminate a
pregnancy. But this right means nothing if it is in words alone. The right to
make these intrinsically private decisions about one’s life, body, and family is
being systematically stripped away by denying women access to the safe, legal
abortion care they deserve. As reproductive justice advocates, we have a
responsibility to fight back against these laws – to protect the clinics
dedicated to providing safe, legal abortion care, and to guarantee that women
have the ability to exercise their legal right to choose.

Laurel Jones is a rising third-year law student at the
University of Washington, and is loving her experience as a summer intern at
Legal Voice. She has spent over four years working to provide housing and human
services for Seattle’s homeless population, and is committed to using her legal
career to fight for reproductive justice, economic equality, and human rights.
Laurel has a BA from the University of Washington in International Studies.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

One of
the most intimate and complex decisions a person can make is when, or if, to have
children. A recent report out of California exposed the state’s
practice of preventing women from making such a decision by sterilizing
incarcerated women through coercion and force.

By
evaluating prison records, the prisoner and women’s rights group Justice
Now discovered that
nearly 150 women were surgically sterilized from 2006-2010 in violation of
state law. It is possible that nearly 100 more women were sterilized dating
back to the late 1990s. Women who witnessed this practice
have reported that the procedure was largely forced upon women of color much more often than onto white women. One
woman reported being told that she had a medical condition that required a hysterectomy, only to find out after being released from prison that she no
longer had symptoms of the condition, making sterilization medically
unnecessary. Women who were pregnant during their time in
prison were repeatedly pressured into being sterilized during labor and
delivery by doctors that treated the practice of tubal ligation as standard,
routine care. Like any medical decision, the decision to be sterilized should
be made with informed consent between a patient and her doctor. Coercing incarcerated
women into making irreversible decisions about her reproductive health by
presenting misleading information about a condition that arguably does not
exist or asking her to make important health decisions during labor is both
unethical and illegal.

The mass
sterilization of women in prison was outlawed in 1979.
The fact that these practices still exist, even with clear laws banning
them, is shocking. What is equally
shocking is that prison officials have purported that they were doing these women
– and California tax payers – a favor by promoting sterilization in the prison
system. One doctor who was paid $147,460 in a thirteen-year period to
perform the procedures justified his actions by stating that he was saving the
taxpayers more than that by saving money in welfare for these “unwanted children.” But this begs the question, “unwanted by
whom?” The attitude taken by this doctor harkens back to a shameful time in our
history when people in power believed that some lives were more important than
others. In fact, California’s history of eugenics
is notorious for having influenced the practices of the Nazi regime in Germany.

This is undeniably
an issue of reproductive choice and reproductive justice. Every person should be afforded the freedom
and resources to decide whether to have children, to not have children, and to
parent the children they have. The California
prison system violated the rights of these women, and robbed them of their
ability to make personal reproductive decisions. While incarcerated, woman are stripped of their connection with
their families
and the ability to exercise their most basic decision making power. To rob
someone of her ability to make the decision to continue having children, even
once she is no longer incarcerated, is further unwarranted punishment and is an
abhorrent abuse of power.This should
outrage all of us who advocate for the right to decide when to have children
and to do so with dignity, free from coercion and violence. As one formerly
incarcerated woman said, “state prison officials
are the real repeat offenders, they repeatedly offended me by denying me my
right to dignity and humanity."

Kelsey is a summer intern at Legal Voice and a rising 3 year law student at
Seattle University School of Law. Kelsey has her undergraduate degree in
Sociology and Women’s Studies from Seattle Pacific University. She is a
California native who loves the Pacific Northwest.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

As Megan beautifully said in our last Legal Voice blog post, same-sex couples won a great victory last week when
the Supreme Court struck down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
Justice Kennedy wrote powerfully about the disparaging
effect of DOMA on couples that States seek to protect and treat with dignity. The
Supreme Court’s decision in United States
v. Windsor does have far-reaching effects; for example, the fall of DOMA
(Section 3, at least) removes a critical barrier to binational couples seeking
to live together without fear of separation in the United States. (In fact, a New York City immigration judge stopped a
removal proceeding moments after hearing the news on DOMA’s
unconstitutionality.)

And yet, we must recognize that the movement for
justice for queer folks does not end with marriage equality. Although marriage
is an important institution for many people regardless of sexual orientation
and therefore should be accessible to every adult citizen in America, it is not
enough. It is not nearly enough to
fight for marriage equality without fighting against injustice on every front.

Queer people in America face significant barriers to
access to health, access to education, and access to justice. Young LGBT people
(especially those that are bisexual or transgender) are disproportionately
represented in homeless populations, due at least in part to
hostility or exclusion from their families. Young queer people are also disproportionately under the care of the state, either in foster care or juvenile justice facilities, and many states
have no policies in place to protect young people under their care from
harassment or discriminatory treatment by staff or other youth. Queer people
are overrepresented in prison populations, and face severe
harassment while incarcerated (from both staff and other
prisoners). For many queer people, health care is not only inaccessible because
of cost, but also because of the harassment and judgment they face when
attempting to receive critical health care. Young LGBT people still face
harassment and violence at school, and often receive education that further
stigmatizes their own identities if it doesn’t ignore them altogether. In New
York City, many transgender women of color are being arrested for prostitution simply because they are transgender and condoms are found in their
bags when police search them. Many trans folks cannot even go to the restroom
in public with experiencing discrimination and harassment; let’s not forget
that just this past Spring an Arizonan legislator introduced a bill in the Arizona state legislature that would
made using the bathroom in accordance to your gender identity/expression a crime.

Marriage does not solve these issues. We should be
proud that another discriminatory law is off the books; we should celebrate
this victory, but we should not become complacent or satisfied until everyone receives full protection under
the law and everyone is treated with
dignity and respect.

Just as loudly as we celebrated the fall of DOMA, we
should have protested the Supreme Court’s dismantlement of the Voting Rights Act and its weakening of
Title VII. Thanks to the Court’s decision in Vance v. Ball State
University, now it will be even
harder for women and LGBT folks to bring a successful employment discrimination
claim.

The fight for LGBT justice means mobilization
against injustice on all fronts; in order to truly break down barriers for
queer people in America, we must commit to breaking down barriers for people of
color, people with disabilities, women and feminine-identified folks,
immigrants, working class people, people experiencing poverty and/or
homelessness, and young people. One identity does not live in isolation to
others, and we all have wonderfully complex identities that uniquely position
us in American society.

As Audre Lorde once said, “there is no such thing as a
single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” In other
words, LGBT rights are women’s rights.
And, until we all work together to dismantle systems of injustice for all
communities and for all people, none of us will ever
truly be free.

Darcy Kues is a third year law student at University of Washington School of
Law and is currently interning with the New York Legal Assistance Group LGBT
Law Project in New York City. She interned with Legal Voice in Spring 2013,
where she researched the potential implications of the overturning of DOMA, as
well as information on emergency contraception availability and issues of
standing in the Supreme Court marriage cases. She is so thankful for everything
she learned at Legal Voice, and is excited to take the knowledge she gained and
apply it to her future work in legal advocacy for LGBTQ folks.

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